Ideas for Newgrounds' Evolution MK3

[liljim]

This is the third incarnation of the Ideas for Newgrounds' Evolution thread.

Please read these guidelines in detail before posting in the topic; MANY things have changed since the release of the redesign over a year ago, and many suggested ideas under speculation in this thread's predecessor have been covered by that (including some that had previously been rejected.)

Posts that do not follow the below guidelines will probably be deleted:

1) Only post here if you have a unique idea for NG's improvement. In an attempt to keep the thread concise, discussion of ideas is NOT encouraged.

2) DO NOT SPAM OR WHINE. This is not the place for you to complain about things you don't like about NG, just for constructive advice and ideas for the future.

3) READ the posts in the thread, to make sure that you are not simply rehashing a previous suggestion.

4) Take the time to consider whether your idea is practical and useful, or frivolous and inefficient:

--- a. What level of user demand for this idea would there be?

--- b. Does it serve a purpose?

--- c. Is there something else NG does that already takes care of this?

--- d. Include your reasoning in your post.

5) Keep in mind that this is neither a list of demands, nor a slate of what WILL be put into place. This is merely a thread to allow the users to express and refine their ideas for what they would like to see done with NG. The final decision ultimately rests with staff.

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Suggested ideas previously rejected:

BBS edit button.

BBS posters rank lists.

BBS spell checker.

Smilies in BBS posts.

Polls for BBS.

User search.

Remote image linking.

More experience for BBS posts.

Extra experience points for voting close to midnight.

Favorite threads in Profile.

Selling NG scripts.

Self banning from the site/BBS/wherever.

Ability to delete your own account.

Deleting old movies that have a bad score - they're not doing anyone any harm and you don't have to watch them.

Big thanks to Denvish, D0GMA, and whoever else contributed original ideas in the previous thread. I'd go through and list the clutch of people who contributed useful suggestions personally, but reading through just under 1,900 pages to get that list is far too time consuming!

[Pounce]

First post!

I'm sure you hear this a lot liljim, but me, and many of the people that frequent the audio portal would love to see a more user-moderated form of flagging submissions as stolen.

Reporting a single submission to a moderator, when 9/10 times the moderator will miss the private message, is frustrating when you can still see something obviously stolen still floating around.

[Fro]

Well this has been suggested many times before in the wi/ht forum, but I also liked the idea. A audio player directly on the userpage. Now of course it wouldn't auto play and you could only use audio from the audio portal of newgrounds. This way artist could better advertise their songs and fans could advertise for their favorite artist or just have one of their favorite songs on their profile.

[ThePigeonMaster]

At 9/24/08 07:43 PM, Corky52 wrote: Well this has been suggested many times before in the wi/ht forum, but I also liked the idea. A audio player directly on the userpage. Now of course it wouldn't auto play and you could only use audio from the audio portal of newgrounds. This way artist could better advertise their songs and fans could advertise for their favorite artist or just have one of their favorite songs on their profile.

I even made a thread about it too:

http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/9465 07

Also, I'm glad you made another thread.
I will try to help around here :)

[NeonFlame126]

I think a better description for the Video Games forum is needed. I think it has by far the worst description of any forum. "Discuss cool games, such as Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers!" doesn't get ANY attention from a lot of users and they may post it in General thinking it belongs there.

[BFK]

Here's a few ideas off the top of my head:

Lift the 200 buddies limit on the coauthor system, and if you go through with the friends list thing, merge the two and just be able to select which buddies you can co-author and can co-author you.

When you update your signature the URL gets erased, even if there is something in the field, so you need to edit it twice.

Can't remove website name and url from profile; if you blank it. it stays the same.

Ability to delete your own blog comments on other peoples blogs.

Multiple responses to blog comments including other commentators.

Ability to change icons on your older submissions.

Lower the minimum search lengths to 3 characters.

Explain why you don't need to delete your own account in the faq or something, there's way to many threads about that.

Insert code html button in flash and programmers forums.

The audio credits in the submit form are a little weird, maybe have one field for crediting a submission with a little (+) button to make extras appear.

[Sk8erGirl14]

A status thing to show if we're online or not that will be on our userpage.

Also, we need a better search bar system, something like this:

[Ismael92]

I know many posts have been done about this, but I think you really need to consider this.

The NG search system can be useful sometimes, but most of the time, especially when you're looking for something old, it doesn't help too much. Here are some things that would be good:

-The fact that the results are displayed by date and not by relevancy makes some searches pretty difficult, when instead of showing up something relevant that can solve a problem (which maybe was asked a very long time ago) shows some thread made yesterday which has nothing to do with what we're looking for.
-Why do we have to browse words that are 4+ characters? What if I want to search for something like "pm", "ban", etc?
-Sometimes to make our search more precise we look for long terms, or maybe we look for a sentence that we saw some day in the past, so we enter several words just to find out that we can't search terms that are longer than 20 characters.
-We can look for someone's post if we enter to his/her profile, but adding this function to the search bar would be nice (search by author). It isn't completely necessary.

I think that's all.

Cheers.

[citricsquid]

API.
I'd love to use something like this, users can sign up to have their data exported to XML every 1 hour or whatever, then other users can use this. So, I could set my account to export AND allow any access, so someone else could use my data, for example post counts. It'd make a lot of things easier, for example NGlog. It'd save the load on the NG servers. Also, it'd be great for integrating my flash submissions into my site, latest etc.

Not sure if this is viable, it might be to heavy on the servers, however, I think it'd be a great feature :)

I think this hasn't been suggested.

[idiot-buster]

Well in our profile pages i would like to see our total voting power insted of just our base voting power, like it was before the redesign. Well thats all i can think of at this moment.

[fetusdoctor]

We should have a better system for browsing audio and Flash, such as the option to sort by most viewed/most listened to.

Also, get rid of the weapon icons for levels and allow users to create their own avatars.

That is all.

[ThePigeonMaster]

At 9/24/08 11:14 PM, fetusdoctor wrote: Also, get rid of the weapon icons for levels and allow users to create their own avatars.

I think it would be nice whether if you choose or the weapon icon or your own avatar.
And you could put a drawing and then you choose the aura to it, like these examples.

It's just my opinion, but I think it would be nice :/

[NuBee]

allow embed content in the forums

[streetbob]

I was talking to my friends during school. And we started talking about NG and our favorite flashes.
Well, some how we started talking about how much we hate it when someone spams their flash out of the judgement-zone. And I thought that maybe that they could make it to where a mod has to make sure its not shit.

I told my friends of the idea, and they said "What if a mod starts spaming it?". I thought about it again. And thought what if they make like a part of NG where only mods could go in. And If a mod spams it gets sent to Tom Fulp.

These are some ideas. I know I'm going to be flamed and this thread is going to trolled like a toll bridge. But, who knows it might work. Tell me if you find any holes in it.

[Bloodman101]

At 9/24/08 11:46 PM, pigeonmaster88 wrote:

At 9/24/08 11:14 PM, fetusdoctor wrote: Also, get rid of the weapon icons for levels and allow users to create their own avatars.

I think it would be nice whether if you choose or the weapon icon or your own avatar.
And you could put a drawing and then you choose the aura to it, like these examples.

It's just my opinion, but I think it would be nice :/

Going with your suggestion I reckon we should be able to choose a weapon before your level.. example; say if you were level 12, but you loved the lv 5 icon, you can switch weapons that you've previously been. :D. I would love that idea. But it still says lvl 12 under your weapon.

[gumOnShoe]

A few recent suggestions that have popped up, I'm sure I mentioned them elsewhere, but I'll list them here too for the sake of it:

1) It would be cool to have some sort of spoiler feature, where you can hide bits of your post so that they are only revealed when people click a link to reveal them. This could come in handy when a user wants to be able to discuss a movie or video game that was recently released without ruining it for everyone else. Right now, we encourage putting spoiler in the title, but its not always effective or followed.

2) An update blurb for topics. I often find that the users complaining about the lack of an edit button, want to actually add on to the original topic with some sort of update. Giving them use of a small space that would appear in a form similar to a response to a review, but could only be used once, might be an interesting alternative. I feel no need to have this feature myself, but it could be interesting, and I think it would be used.

3) The ability to post pictures in the middle of a post. Maybe still require that text comes before the picture, but there have been times when I've wanted to refer directly to a graph or some other graphic, and I've had to put it at the bottom where it feels unrelated or might be after a very long post.

[36Holla]

The only suggestion I have is that you get an indicator of when someone has responded to one of your news posts. I picture something similar to how you're notified that you have a PM, but perhaps it could be a different color or look different to distinguish itself as a news post comment and when you clicked on it, you would be taken directly to the news post that was commented on. That would come in handy for those who make multiple news posts around the same time so the author would see comments that they might have missed otherwise.

[BetaOrionis]

Raise the number of votes pre-judgement from 200 to 300.

Raise the passing score to 1.99.

Only award B/P points if the user's vote comes within 1.5 of the average. This should discourage voting 0 and 5 to undeserving submissions, and forces the average user to think more carefully about submissions before voting. The current system only forces users to evaluate whether or not the submission will pass, and doesn't require a decent evaluation.

Display whistle points. I mean, why not?

Develop a "User Quality" stat. It would be based on the number of and ratios of useful reviews to useless/abusive reviews, and could also factor in batting average, post count, and anything else considered beneficial to the NG community. Users could moderate this stat. Beneath every post/review/submission there should be an option of "Quality Point", and every user has the option to give one point per day, sort of like the way we have limited EXP gains. This encourages users (especially the statwhores) to occasionally write a review of surpassing quality, or make an extremely useful point or topic in the forums. Right now, there is no stat indicator of how useful a user really is.

Equality for the audio portal (B/P system, whistle, Exp, etc)

[Haggard]

Make the users able to sort reviews by date of author response. It's always a bit unsatisfying if I notice that the number of my responses increased but I can't find the response because the author responded to a very old review.

Also, the reviews should be sortable by rating, just how it was before the redisign.

[Aci6]

I think the Search engine should be improved as of now, it is very redundant, I mean it is case-sensitive and one word off generates "No results could be found", exceptional annoying for perhaps visitors.
I will go out and say its the worst search engine I've ever seen/used.

[BananaBreadMuffin]

Apart from the whole search bar being a pile of shit, I'd like to see "Which of my [PM contacts] (or buddies or whatever) have new blogs?", "Which of my blog comments have been responded to?", and being able to put images mid-way through blogs. I can do it with youtube vids, why not with stills?

[kidray76]

PM System:

Sent Folder
It would be awesome if there was a folder where a copy of sent pms are saved. Been times I couldn't remember what was sent to a couple of mods or users and think it could be handy in cutting down miscommunications/threads.

Audio Player for user page
Been mentioned a few times, but I think it would be pretty cool if people can use the audio portal entries to listen on the userpage without having to go to submission page to listen.

[Insanimation]

Bring back the ability to change your name.

I'm sure there's a reason why it was removed, but other than the whole thing about people changing their name constantly to be annoying, there are no real cons that I can think of. You could always make it that you can only change your name once. When you're 13, you think that cooldude1 is a good name. A few years later, you realise that drunkbovine is a bit cooler...

Those were just examples btw. Any people called cooldude1 or drunkbovine on Newgrounds is entirely coincidental.

[SweetSkater]

Less strict mods, i hate being banned for making valid points in arguments, but the Mod doesn't like it.

Also i would like a better search system, at the moment it really is bad, for searching forum topics, it is terrible! No offense. It can be improved easily though :)

[Alfie]

I don't see why User Search and Spelll checker were denied.

However, I have the suggestion of 'Topics By User' as it is a small thing wanted by many users in the past.

And another thing would be to be able to minimize the footer with a little button like on dA.

Also, Strikethrough ability on blogs would be useful when updating and something closes down or gets deleted.

Also, one thing you need to fix which I did on one of my previous posts is this:

Fix Me >:¬(

[Alfie]

At 9/25/08 12:24 PM, Alfie wrote: Also, one thing you need to fix which I did on one of my previous posts is this:

Fix Me >:¬(

Oops, too many there, sorry about that.

[bob]

At 9/25/08 12:26 PM, Alfie wrote:

At 9/25/08 12:24 PM, Alfie wrote: Also, one thing you need to fix which I did on one of my previous posts is this:

Fix Me >:¬(

Oops, too many there, sorry about that.

Fixed.

You can thanks James. And we thank you for bringing it to our attention!

[Alfie]

At 9/25/08 12:52 PM, bob wrote: Fixed.

You can thanks James. And we thank you for bringing it to our attention!

Yay. I helped NG.

[Victory]

User page header upload system needs fixing.

Currently, it doesn't display the uploading animation like the other uploaders on the site do (so it is hard to know when the image has been uploaded) and there is also no way to remove a header. If the system could be changed to the same as the other uploaders, that would be cool.

[BlackPT]

Some time a go I made a suggestion on the forums and in my news posts. I'll just copy and paste that post to remember.

Instead the "vomit" friends system, Tom should implant a flash presentation with 1/2 MB of limit and 200x200/300x300 pixels in the profile. A bit like My New Grounds and stuff.

Tom also could put this system on a button tab or simply replace the user image by a flash.
What do you think?

Tom respond:

"We've avoided letting users put Flash directly on their page because we don't want people to be afraid of "surprises" when they click a link to a user page. Having a button that opens a presentation could be kinda cool, though, so maybe some day. :)"

"Some day" is NEVER said one of the Fulps, but maybe the only admin that never talked about cocks could do something (lol?)